Felipe Neto’s Netflix Debut ‘Makes No Sense’ As Comedy, But Maybe More As Brazilian Life Coach

So much of our attention on social media stars and the globalization of the Internet still focuses on Americans. We forget that YouTube and Instagram (and other platforms to a lesser extent) have rocketed young men and women to fame in their own countries, too.

Neto’s fan base continues to expand, surging in the past week to pass 9.7 million YouTube subscribers. An opening scene in the lobby of the São Paulo theater where he recorded his 90-minute special finds Neto and a friend pranking his fans, sneaking up behind them as they pose for selfies in front of his banner.

When the lights go out inside the theater – and they do repeatedly as his show consists of a series of autobiographical vignettes – hundreds of female voices shriek with delight.

Neto, 29, has been a YouTube star in Brazil since he was 22. But for all of the ranting and raving, make no mistake in thinking he’s a proper comedian. Or a role model, for that matter. In fact, he lets the audience knows he’ll swear throughout the show, and it’s up to parents to police what their kids are watching, on YouTube or Netflix. As for the comedy? Neto acknowledges in Portuguese (the special includes English subtitles): “If you came tonight, or you are watching on Netflix at this moment, because you want to watch a stand-up, you’re fucked. That’s not what’s going to happen. Today I’m going to tell a story.”

And it’s not a particularly funny story.

So let us not judge it on those merits, but rather, for what it is: A one-man show with an inspirational message. Neto, like more than a few YouTube stars in the United States, became famous in Brazil for sharing his emotions in direct confessionals to a camera and uploading them where millions of pre-teens, teens and young adults could identify and relate to him. Neto, born and raised in one of Rio’s slums, started making YouTube videos at 22, and three years later wrote a book about his Internet-earned fame, Não Faz Sentido! – Por Trás da Câmera, on which he based this show.

This is what you see and hear without subtitles:

It’s also far different from Lilly Singh’s YouTube Red movie, A Trip to Unicorn Island, which tells her story as well as following her on a global tour with a full production.

No. Neto’s Netflix special keeps the cameras on him and him alone, unless he’s talking to an audience member or asking us to watch him watch an old YouTube video of himself from the stage.

He says he knew he wanted to entertain when he was as young as 6, and makes fun at himself for coming off as a homosexual, using derogatory language throughout. He jokes early: “Once and for all, so there are no more doubts. I know you are not going to believe it, but it’s true. I’m straight. I know. I know that a lot of people are not gong to believe it, but still. I swear. I swear. I was born like this. I cannot change it.”

When he’s not swearing or using slurs (he also talks about several times authority figures or audiences might have suspected he was “retarded”), Neto’s describing his multiple false starts as an actor and as an entrepreneur in his late teens. At only 20, he already felt like a failure, stuck in a rut, living in dreams of what might happen, or what he calls “The Stage of Tomorrow.” In this way, Neto sees himself now as some sort of Millennial life coach, encouraging his fans to follow their passions today, facing their fears and pressing a red “f— it” button to move forward.

If you’re not Brazilian or speak Portuguese, though, you probably still don’t know what Neto has to offer, exactly, beyond that.

For his path roughly follows that of other, bigger American YouTube stars. Get your own camera. Point it at yourself. Shoot yourself as if nobody’s watching. And have a passion for what you’re doing, otherwise why are you doing it?

Neto takes the audience through viewings of his earliest YouTube videos from April 2010, which he has kept up on his channel for their sentimental significance. Like this one:

What’s different years later? Within the span of 90 minutes, even, Neto goes from joking about how anyone wanting to make it in show business can do so, “if you are willing you get far using your asshole. Fact,” to making proclamations by the end that everyone, himself included, needs to evolve past homophobia.

“It took a while until my imbecile brain realized that using gay as an offense is to say that gays are inferior to you,” Neto says.

And so he goes about preaching tolerance to his adoring fans, about how the Bible shouldn’t be misused to condemn homosexuality, and oh, yeah, how Neto stopped letting his fears control him, and that’s how he became a YouTube star.